The Great Emu War: How 20,000 Birds Outran Australia’s Machine Guns

On the morning of November 2, 1932, a sergeant of the Royal Australian Artillery settled behind a Lewis gun at the edge of a wheat paddock near Campion, a scrap of a railway town about 300 kilometres east of Perth. The enemy was in sight: roughly 40 to 50 big, shaggy, grey-brown birds, feeding on a crop the local settlers could not afford to lose. The gun chattered. The birds split up and ran. By the end of the day the newspapers had a name for what was happening in the Western Australian wheatbelt, and the name stuck for the next 94 years: the Emu War.

It is one of history’s great punchlines. Australia sent soldiers with machine guns against a flightless bird and, depending on how you score it, lost. The joke has been retold in a viral cartoon video with more than 23 million views, two feature films and countless memes. But underneath the comedy is a real and slightly sad story about broke ex-soldiers on marginal land, a federal government looking for an easy political win, newspapers hungry for a lark during the Depression, and an animal that turned out to be far better at being an emu than anyone expected.

A wheat frontier built by soldiers

The trouble began with a promise. After the First World War, Australian governments settled thousands of returned servicemen on farms. In Western Australia, the soldier settlement scheme pushed many of them into the eastern Wheatbelt, a band of newly cleared country east of Perth where rainfall was thin and the margin for error thinner. National Geographic puts the number of soldier settlers in the region at more than 5,000. Campion itself only became a gazetted townsite in March 1929, after the railway arrived, and it sat right where the line crossed the long rabbit-proof fence.

For a few years it worked. The Campion district produced 40,000 bags of wheat in 1928. Then the Great Depression hit. Farmers were urged to grow more wheat, and the federal government promised subsidies to help them do it. The subsidies failed to arrive on time, wheat prices kept falling, and by October 1932 the growers were preparing to bring in the season’s harvest while threatening to refuse to deliver it. They were, in other words, about as close to the edge as a farm can get without going over.

Politics in the west was raw, too. Many Western Australians felt that the eastern states ran the federation for their own benefit, and a secession movement was gathering strength; in 1933 Western Australians would vote for secession in a referendum that was never implemented. Wendy Porter, a library manager in nearby Merredin who has combed the old newspapers, told ABC News in 2022 that the Wheat Growers Union was among those pushing for secession, and that Canberra suddenly had a reason to look helpful. “Oh, they’re having problems with the emus,” is how she summed up the federal government’s thinking, “we could do something to help.”

Twenty thousand visitors

Then the birds arrived. Emus are not strictly migratory; the ecologist Rowan Mott told National Geographic that emus are “dispersive rather than migratory,” with movements that “can occur in any direction.” But after their breeding season, and especially in dry years, they can gather in large numbers and move long distances. In 1932, a dry spell in the interior sent an estimated 20,000 of them toward the coast. Along the way they found something wonderful: thousands of acres of freshly cleared land, dams full of water for livestock, and fields of ripening wheat.

Western Australia had built a barrier for exactly this sort of invasion, just not for this invader. The State Barrier Fence, better known as the rabbit-proof fence, was finished in 1907, and its main line ran 1,833 kilometres north to south, at the time the longest unbroken fence in the world. It was built of posts and wires with netting to stop rabbits, and it was patrolled by boundary riders. Against a determined emu, it was a minor inconvenience. The birds pushed through and tore holes in it, and the rabbits followed them in.

Ralph English, whose father farmed at Campion during the “war,” explained the real damage to ABC News: “The worst part about emus is … it’s not what they eat, it’s what they flatten. They just trample around on the crop and knock it all over.” One Walgoolan farmer told a reporter in early November 1932 that crops expected to yield ten bags an acre had been cut to five; settlers at Campion spoke of six-bag crops reduced to three over 200 acres. A senator who visited the district later told Parliament that the birds “actually roll down the crops,” behaving in a wheat field the way barnyard fowls behave in a yard.

Before the army ever arrived, the locals tried to handle it themselves. A South Australian paper that covered the opening of the campaign reported that farmers had hired a motor lorry to run emus down while men on the running boards struck at them with sticks, and that boys on bicycles had chased the birds and killed 27 in a single morning. But, the report added, “the emus are too wary now.”

A minister, a major and two Lewis guns

So the settlers did what returned soldiers might naturally do. They sent a deputation to the federal Minister for Defence, Sir George Pearce, who was himself a senator for Western Australia, and asked for machine guns. Having served in the First World War, many of them had seen what a machine gun could do to a crowded target, and 20,000 emus sounded like a crowded target.

Pearce agreed, with conditions. Soldiers, not civilians, would operate the guns. The Western Australian government would pay to move them. The farmers would provide food and lodging and would pay for the ammunition; a newspaper report from Campion says the state’s Agricultural Bank guaranteed the £50 for 10,000 rounds, with settlers and Perth firms expected to subscribe the money. The bill did find its way back to the farmers: in December, a senator asked why the Kellerberrin branch of the Agricultural Bank had sent a Walgoolan settler an account for £24 to cover the full cost of the ammunition used. Pearce later told the Senate that he had been “asked to allow machine guns belonging to the Defence Department to be used for the destruction of the birds, the farmers undertaking to pay for the necessary ammunition.” He also reportedly saw the job as useful target practice. A cameraman from Fox Movietone was brought along to film it, which tells you that someone expected a show.

There is a neat irony in Pearce’s involvement. In 1915, as Defence Minister during the First World War, he was the man who allowed every unit of the Australian Light Horse to wear an emu plume in their slouch hats, a tradition borrowed from Queensland mounted troops who had plucked feathers from emus they rode down in 1891. Light horsemen used to tease credulous outsiders by insisting the plumes were “kangaroo feathers.” According to one newspaper account, Major Meredith’s orders in 1932 included collecting 100 emu skins so their feathers could be used for light horsemen’s hats.

The force itself was tiny. Major Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith of the 7th Heavy Battery, Royal Australian Artillery, commanded exactly two other soldiers: Sergeant S. McMurray and Gunner J. O’Halloran. They had two Lewis guns, the drum-fed light machine gun of the First World War, and 10,000 rounds. Rain delayed the start of operations, scattering the birds, and the three men did not reach Campion by train from Perth until the start of November.

The opening days at Campion

The first shots came on November 2. According to the report that ran the next day under the headline “EMU WAR OPENS,” Sergeant McMurray fired the first drum at about noon at a flock of roughly 40 emus in an unfenced 300-acre paddock less than a mile from town. That paper claimed half a dozen birds fell “on the run” at a range of 1,400 yards, which is either fine shooting or fine reporting. Other accounts of the same day describe settlers trying to herd about 50 birds into range, only to watch the flock split into small groups and run in every direction. The first rounds were ineffective; later that day “perhaps a dozen” birds were killed.

Perth’s Daily News, whose special correspondent was filing from Campion, gave the early verdict on November 3: “The emus are more than holding their own.” On November 4, Meredith set what should have been a perfect trap at a farm dam. More than 1,000 emus were spotted heading toward the water. This time the gunners waited until the birds were close. They opened fire, killed about a dozen, and then the gun jammed. The rest of the flock vanished before it could be cleared.

Over the following days the reports from Campion read like dispatches from a strange front. One gun was mounted on a truck, and the Sydney Morning Herald reported on November 8 that the gunners had chased about a dozen birds “across a rough paddock at 35 miles an hour.” The emus kept a lead of about 60 yards until they reached some timber, and the gunners found it “impossible to shoot from the bumping vehicle.” Later retellings say the truck crashed; the 1932 report says only that the plan did not work.

Most striking of all was how the birds seemed to adapt. The Kalgoorlie Miner reported that “each mob has its leader, always an enormous black plumed bird, standing fully six feet high, who keeps watch while his fellows busy themselves with the wheat. At the first suspicious sign he gives the signal and dozens of heads stretch out of the crop.” A few birds would bolt for the scrub, the paper said, “the leader always remaining until his followers have reached safety.”

The newspapers were also fascinated by the birds’ sheer toughness. In a dispatch printed under the headline “Hardest Bird to Kill,” the Daily News described an emu that was chased down the rabbit-proof fence by a car, hit in the leg by a rifle shot, clubbed, and shot in the head with a .22 from a foot away. Its pursuers walked back to the car, satisfied, and then noticed the “dead” emu sitting up with its head in the air. It took another bullet. “The emu is maintaining its reputation of being the hardest bird in the world to kill,” the paper declared.

“Guerrilla tactics”

The official tally from those first days is a mess. A Campion report dated November 5 claimed 2,000 rounds fired and about 200 birds killed. The November 8 dispatch said 1,870 rounds had been fired and casualties were “estimated at nearly 300.” Other estimates put the first-week kill as low as 50, while settlers claimed as many as 500. By November 8, about 2,500 rounds, a quarter of the ammunition, had been fired.

The basic problem was that machine guns work best against targets that bunch together and stand still, and emus do neither when frightened. The ornithologist Dominic Serventy later summed it up in the language of a military historian:

The machine-gunners’ dreams of point-blank fire into serried masses of Emus were soon dissipated. The Emu command had evidently ordered guerrilla tactics, and its unwieldy army soon split up into innumerable small units that made use of the military equipment uneconomic.

Meredith himself became, almost against his will, the emus’ best publicist. “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds, it would face any army in the world,” he said after the first withdrawal. “They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks.” His side, he noted, had suffered no casualties.

Parliament gets the joke

By then the whole country was laughing. On November 8, the House of Representatives took up the matter. One member asked Prime Minister Joseph Lyons who was responsible for “the farce of hunting emus with machine guns” and who was paying for it. When a New South Wales Labor politician asked whether a medal would be struck for those taking part in the war, A. E. Green, a Labor member from Western Australia, replied: “The emus have won every round so far.” Pearce, who would be nicknamed the “Minister for the Emu War,” ordered the guns and crew withdrawn that same day.

It is worth pausing on what the press was doing. Much of the Emu War as we know it was written by newspaper correspondents who treated it as comic relief in a grim year, borrowing the vocabulary of the trenches for a pest-control job. They were not the first to discover that readers love a good animal yarn; a century earlier, a New York paper had sold out its print runs by describing bat-winged people living on the Moon. The Emu War coverage was true, but it was shaped for laughs, and the war metaphor did a lot of work.

The second campaign

The withdrawal did nothing for the farmers. The emus kept coming, drawn by the dams as the dry weather held, and the growers renewed their pleas. Western Australia’s Premier, James Mitchell, backed them. At the same time, a report from the Base Commander claimed that 300 emus had been killed in the first operation, which gave Pearce the cover he needed. By November 12 he had approved a return.

Pearce defended the decision in the Senate on November 18. Asked whether the birds could be killed by “more humane, if less spectacular, methods,” he replied, as the Melbourne Argus reported, that people unfamiliar with emu country could not realise the damage the birds could do. Because of the drought inland, the birds “had come down in thousands to the settled areas,” and rabbits followed through the gaps they made in the fences. He insisted it was no more cruel to kill the birds with machine guns than with rifles, and that wounded birds were despatched as soon as the firing ceased.

Meredith was back in the field on November 13. The plan had been for the army to lend the guns to Western Australia and let the state supply the gunners, but there was apparently no one else experienced enough to use them. The second campaign went better, at least by the numbers. About 40 emus were killed in the first two days. By early December the gunners were reportedly killing around 100 birds a week. Meredith was recalled on December 10.

His final report claimed 986 confirmed kills from 9,860 rounds, exactly 10 rounds per bird, plus exactly 2,500 wounded birds that he said had later died of their injuries. Those suspiciously round numbers have not aged well; historian Greg Beyer has called the figure “highly disputed” and “likely to be very inflated.” Even taken at face value, roughly a thousand dead emus out of an estimated 20,000 was not a victory anyone could build a monument to. Meredith reported no losses on his own side apart from “a broken extractor and return spring.”

Why the emus won

Strip away the war jokes and the outcome makes sense. An emu is a formidable animal. It can grow up to about 1.9 metres tall, it has long, heavily muscled legs, and it can sprint at around 48 kilometres an hour. It can walk long distances in search of food and water and go weeks without eating. Its feathers are shaggy and loose, with dark tips that soak up the sun while the inner layer insulates the skin, which lets it stay active in the heat of the day. Its legs are among the strongest of any animal’s, powerful enough to tear down metal fencing.

A Lewis gun, meanwhile, is a weapon designed for a very different world. It fired at around ten rounds a second, accurate enough against lines of men crossing open ground, but the emus offered small, scattered, fast-moving targets in long crops and scrub. A big, loose-feathered body also hides how small the vital organs are, which helps explain why so many birds kept running after they were hit. And, critically, the emus were not trying to fight. They only had to run, scatter and come back once the shooting stopped. Pearce himself acknowledged the pattern in his Senate defence: once the shooting stopped, the birds had returned in thousands.

There is a tendency, in the retelling, to make the emus into canny guerrilla generals. The truth is simpler. Emus are wary animals that react to threats by running, they are hard to kill quickly, and they move in loose groups that can split in seconds. Those traits had kept them alive on a continent that, for most of their history, was full of predators. Three soldiers with two machine guns were a new problem, but not a fundamentally different one.

Bounties, fences and the long war

The farmers did not stop asking for soldiers. They requested military help again in 1934, 1943 and 1948, and were turned down each time. Instead, Western Australia leaned on a bounty system that had begun in 1923, paying people to bring in proof of dead emus. It was far deadlier than the army had ever been: 57,034 bounties were claimed in just six months of 1934. Australian Geographic reports that around 284,700 emus were killed in Western Australia between 1945 and 1960. In 1950 the federal government went further and released 500,000 rounds of .303 ammunition for farmers to use on emus.

Fences, in the end, did more than guns. The state barrier fence was extended and strengthened, and it became known in places as the Emu Fence. Exclusion fencing kept birds out of the wheat but also blocked their seasonal movements, and conservationists warned that it could threaten the birds that depended on them. Even in 1932, some critics had raised the alarm; a few conservationists in Britain protested the “extermination of the rare emu,” a phrase that would have puzzled anyone who had just watched a thousand of them run toward a dam.

The emus have, by any measure, come out fine. Unlike the European wild cattle that people hunted down until the last aurochs died in a Polish forest in 1627, the emu has thrived alongside farming. Cleared land and stock water actually expanded its range in the arid interior. Wild emus have been protected under federal environmental law since 1999, the species is listed as least concern, and National Geographic puts the wild population at more than 600,000. Emus, as a seed-spreading wanderer, also do real ecological work, carrying the seeds of plants such as the native quandong across huge distances.

A joke that keeps coming back

For decades, the Emu War was a small footnote, an amusing anecdote for Australians and hardly known elsewhere. The internet changed that. The animated “Emu War” episode from the YouTube channel OverSimplified, which the Canberra Times reported had passed 23 million views by 2023, turned it into a global meme. An action-comedy film called The Emu War premiered at Monster Fest on October 22, 2023, and another, The Great Emu War, co-written by John Cleese, has been in the works.

It sits comfortably in a long tradition of wartime ideas that sounded better in an office than in a field. Britain once seriously considered building an aircraft carrier out of ice and sawdust, and during the First World War the British government had schoolchildren collecting conkers to make explosives. The Emu War is smaller and sillier than either, but it comes from the same place: a government under pressure, a problem that seemed simple, and a tool that did not fit the job.

Campion itself barely survived its moment of fame. When a mineral processing plant opened at nearby Chandler in 1942, development shifted there. The Campion railway siding closed in 1956, and the townsite was formally cancelled in 1972. When the military historian Mark Dapin drove through the wheatbelt looking for the battlefield in 2023, he found that almost nothing remained of Campion. What he did find, framed in steel on the roadside of Rabbit Proof Fence Road, was a sign reading “Emu War 1932,” with an emu on either side.

In a sense, that sign is the right memorial. The Emu War was not really a war, and the emus did not really win it, any more than a flood wins against a dam. The soldier settlers who called in the guns were desperate people trying to save a harvest in the depths of the Depression. But it is hard not to smile at the image that has outlived all of them: three men, two machine guns, a truck bouncing across a paddock at 35 miles an hour, and a mob of six-foot birds keeping a steady 60 yards ahead, all the way to the trees.

Further reading